


This Lunar Beauty

by Stakebait



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-11
Updated: 2010-06-11
Packaged: 2017-10-10 01:40:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/93813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stakebait/pseuds/Stakebait
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dru giveth and Dru taketh away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Lunar Beauty

**Author's Note:**

  * For [magpie (jamjar)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamjar/gifts), [magpie (jamjar)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamjar/gifts).



> Written for the Angel Book of Days challenge, Autumn 2003 edition. Spoilers through AtS 5.4  
> Title from the eponymous poem by W.H. Auden.  
> Requirements were Drusilla, post-Home, no Wes/Fred

Dru picked her flowers carefully, filling her pockets and the mouth of the dead girl. She missed proper flower sellers, old ladies in black bonnets and shawls whose voices quavered on street corners. They sighed gently when you ate them. This girl had summer-blond streaks in her hair although it was quite the wrong season. And white, white skin after Labor Day. It wasn't proper, not proper at all. The flowers in her pocket were red and purple, pansies and poppies and violets. Spike was back, she could taste him, ashes falling like snow. We all fall down and down and down and down and down. Her Angel had taught her, there was always further you could fall. Drusilla left a trail of leaves behind her. Green leaves, they had been, all wrong, but she had fixed it. Blood fixes everything.

***

Angel knew he was gonna have a bad day because it was day, and bad was the only kind they came in here at Wolfram and Hart, home of the conference call and the pain in the ass memo. He knew he was doing good 'cause Wes said he was doing good: had even done some kind of fucking computer thing with pie charts on the wall. Bad guys put out of business. Good guys put back in business. People saved. Selling out does 43 percent more good than hitting stuff.

Like he told him when he turned off the computer, Angel trusted Wes. If Wes said it was better, it was better, and if Angel didn't like it, well, that's redemption for ya. Nobody said it was gonna be fun, or if they did they were pissants who didn't know what they were talking about. Angel just wondered sometimes what he, personally, was doing here. He wasn't a lawyer. He wasn't even that good a boss. What he was really good at was going off on his own and hitting stuff until it stopped moving. Bad enough he could never be alone here, but what really, purely ticked him off was things he couldn't hit.

Which brought him to Spike. Okay, so he couldn't leave the city. He was on some kind of supernatural leash, which boy, wouldn't that have been handy in the old days? Angel couldn't decide if he'd have kept it in his pocket and played with it just to piss Spike off, or hung it over a lamp post in Madrid and taken the girls off to Paris on the first coach going. But the point was, LA was a big fucking city. There were people who lived here who Angel never saw from one year to the next. Goldie Hawn, as for example. Why the fuck couldn't Spike go haunt someplace else?

"Hey Spike," he said, not bothering to look up. Spike would be there, looking bored and almost as annoyed as Angel felt. "Why don't you go haunt someplace else?"

Spike shrugged. Angel could fucking hear him shrug, no matter what Fred said about ghosts and their lack of ability to move the air around. "No good movies out," he said. "Might as well watch you balls up everything." Angel rubbed his forehead and thought longingly of shoving something down Spike's throat -- a pocket handkerchief, his fist, Spike's teeth.

The intercom buzzed. "Angel, security says your two o' clock's in the downstairs conference room," said Harmony, sounding, as usual, too excited about it. The downstairs conference room, huh. That was specially reinforced, for clients too dangerous to be given free range of the building. Angel hoped today's problem child wouldn't trash the table like last week's. "Gimme 15 and then bring in blood and coffee, and get the cleaning people on call," he told Harmony.

Angel pressed a few more buttons in an experimental spirit. "Who're you trying to phone?" asked Spike.

Angel toyed with the idea of telling Spike it was none of his business, but that would just drag the whole "Spike talking" thing out longer. "Lorne," he said.

Spike's ghostly finger went through the third button from the top. "For fuck's sake, Angel, they're labeled."

Angel glared at him. "In Harmony's handwriting. Unlike some people, I'm not used to reading her love notes, Blondie Bear."

Ah, that did it. Spike gave him two fingers and mercifully disappeared. Angel made a mental note to play the Harmony card more often. Too bad he couldn't just keep her in his office, but then instead of Spike he'd have to listen to Harmony.

"Yello, Wolfram and Hart, Entertainment division.. oh, what can I do for you, Angelfood?"

Angel hummed a few bars of "back in the high life". "Got a big one waiting. Worst case, can I kill it?"

Lorne sounded wistful. "You tell me, my fallen Angel. But all signs point to no. Gotta go, I've got Schwartzenegger on the line."

He hung up. Angel shrugged and went to hit the down button on the elevator.

***

Whatever Angel was expecting, it wasn't this. Tribe of Glactians here to bitch about him blowing up their nest, maybe. Run of the mill evil wizard in trouble with the LAPD's crack evil wizarding squad. Squaln demon with a nasty custody battle, sure. In his darkest nightmare, maybe Lindsay MacDonald saying "Hi, boss." But not Dru, lying on his conference table like it was a bier, surrounded by fucking red brown leaves and flower petals. What did she do, have them FedExed in from New England?

Angel turned around to walk right back out again, only to run into Lilah Morgan closing the door behind him -- and what was worse with her inside the room.

"This is my two o'clock?" Angel demanded. "I don't have time for this, Lilah." He shoved her back against the door. If it hadn't been three inches of specially reinforced steel, he'd have shoved her right through it.

"Careful, boss, don't want to make me lose my head and do something foolish."

Angel stared through her to indicate the hilarity that he felt at yet another detachable head reference. "You're going to get out of the way so I can leave and tell security to throw an incendiary grenade in here," he explained. "If you're quick, I'll even let you out first." So much for trimming the interior decoration budget. At least Lorne would be happy. And Angel wouldn't have to watch.

Long, thin arms twined around his waist. He hadn't even heard her move, dammit. Angel was off his game.

"But Daddy," Dru whined, "there's so much I have to tell you."

Angel had to let go of Lilah to peel Dru free and backhand her into the wall. "Not now sweetheart, Daddy's busy," he said absentmindedly.

"How touching," sneered Lilah. "You did say you wanted to know who or what had recovered that amulet and mailed it to you?"

Angel stopped short. "You mean Dru...?" When he sent her out on the assignment, he'd assumed it was a ploy of the senior partners to drive him crazy, and been hoping to flush out one of their agents. That and to get Lilah out of his hair for a while.

Lilah retrieved her fallen clipboard, giving Angel an eyeful of dead but perky cleavage. "I'll just leave you two alone to catch up."

***

Angel sat on one side of the conference table and Drusilla sat on the other. Fucking her on it, tying her to it, breaking off a leg and staking her with it, or threatening to stake her anyway, that was more their usual mode of communication. This thing, with the big expanse of wood between them and the talking? That was just weird.

Angel stopped sketching her cheekbones on one of the yellow pads Lilah'd left behind and tried to concentrate. Decoding Dru was always a challenge.

"You sent the amulet?"

Dru gave him a sunny smile. "I crawled through fire and the bones of the earth. It called to me with a hundred voices and I sang to it like a baby. It showed me my own face, my real one," Angel knew that meant fangs and ridges, "and I knew my Spike was caught inside, like a rat in a trap." Dru's smile could cut, "so I sent him home."

"Next time just send a fruit basket."

"It burned me. It burned like the sun, like crosses and candles. It burned like you, Daddy." Dru turned back her loose, bell-shaped sleeve to show streaks of thick, ugly scars. She held them out to him. Angel couldn't tell if that was supposed to be from crawling through the rubble or from him. He tried to tell himself he didn't feel guilty.

Angel tried to stick to the facts. He was a detective, sort of. "It wasn't your handwriting on the envelope," he pointed out.

"I had a helper."

That figured. Dru was never alone for long. "Who is he?"

Dru licked her lips. "He was delicious."

Angel gave a relieved sigh. That made things simpler. Um, he meant worse.

He got to the question that was really bothering him. "Why?"

Before she could answer, Harmony bustled in with a tray full of refreshments. "Here you go, boss -- Droodzilla?"

The tray landed on the table with a thump. Harmony walked up to Dru and shook a finger in her face. "If you're here for Blondie Bear you can't have him. Not that I know why you'd want him, he's all with no body now, and moody and bossy as ever, and he slept with the Slayer which is just gross, plus there's the soul -- no offense, Boss -- but anyway you can't have him so there!"

"You can go now, Harmony," Angel said as he poured himself a cup of pig and otter.

Harmony ignored him and formed her manicured nails into something like claws, poised to scratch Dru's face.

Dru smiled and reached up to pat her cheek. "Such a good little girl. All shining and new, like plastic daisies. I'm not here for Spike. He belongs with Angel now."

"Oh!" Harmony dropped her ridiculous pose and straightened her pink suit. "In that case, nice dress. Did you get it in Beverly Hills?"

Dru's frown of confusion wrinkled her forehead. "She didn't tell me her name." She stood up and twirled for Harmony. "Do you really like it?"

"Oh, totally. Very Victorian chic."

Angel felt every minute of his 250 years. "Girls? Girls? I'm trying to have a meeting here?"

"Oh, right. So-orry." Harmony rolled her eyes at Drusilla, but finally consented to leave the room.

Instead of taking her seat again, Dru sashayed around the table to dip her finger into Angel's cup of blood and lick it slowly clean. Angel loosened his suddenly tight collar.

"Why?"

"I'm hungry." Dru pouted and looked through her lashes at Angel. Angel drained the mug, dropped it, and caught Dru by the throat, pushing her down on the table. Now he was on familiar ground. "Why did you go hunting for the fucking costume jewelry, Dru? And why send it here?"

Angel knew he was probably wasting his time asking Dru why. If the stars didn't tell her the doll did. But the thing with all the voices sounded like Buffy's Big Bad, and if it was still on the rampage he had to know before he -- couldn't squeeze info out of Dru any more.

Dru wriggled happily in his punishing grip. "I missed you, Daddy. Now that you've come back to our side, can't we be a family again?"

Angel wished she'd at least look like she wasn't enjoying herself. This was interrogation, not foreplay.

"I'm not on your side." Angel didn't know what side he was on, anymore, but not that one. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a lighter. "Why, Dru? Don't make me burn it out of you."

Dru's face fell. "No more burning. The leaves are all ash. It's the balance, my Angel. Light and dark. One is taken, one is given."

Right. Darla. Dru had taken Darla from him. This was her insane way of making it up to him, by sending him her Spike to drive him out of his mind. Angel let go of Dru's throat and stalked away to the window. He only had himself to blame for the insane part. He should hate her for vamping Darla, but he couldn't. Not when Connor had come of it. He had to believe staking herself to save Connor was her moment of redemption, even if no one remembered it but him.

Angel made himself reach for the stake in his pocket. He couldn't afford weakness. Darla was gone, Spike was... neutralized, it was past time to end this.

He leapt for Dru with full vampiric speed, but she danced out of the way, laughing. "Naughty, naughty Angel. You don't want to do that. If I don't come back, a little birdie will tell all your friends what you took from them. About my brother. And then you'll be all alone."

Angel froze. Dru knew about Connor. She had to die, for Connor to be safe. But he couldn't afford to let her tell the others either. Dammit, her tasty friend must've set this up before Dru ate him. Contingency plans weren't her style.

Angel settled for ramming the stake all the way through Dru's shoulder, putting her right arm out of commission. "Go near him," he threatened, "and I will make you beg for death. Now get out of here."

"Good-bye, Daddy." Dru stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. "I got what I've come for."

He opened the door. Lilah was there. "Don't," he said to her briefly. She held up her hands in a gesture of truce. Angel closed the door behind Dru and punched a dent in it.

***

Angel was busy staring into space, trying to figure a way to protect Connor without him ever knowing, when there was a knock at his office door. Angel ignored it, but it didn't go away.

"Not now, Wes." Angel called out.

"Angel, I really think you should see this," Wesley persisted, opening the door uninvited.

"What is it? Another apocalypse?"

"No," said Wesley, heading for Angel's desk.

"Then it can wait."

"I don't believe it can."

Wes sat down in Angel's chair without waiting for permission, and Angel stifled a growl. He opened his laptop and began calling up files. "Look at this," he directed.

Angel looked at it. It was a computer. "What? Wes, this isn't a good time."

"Our security camera feeds have been tampered with here, here and here. Very sophisticated. It was either a tremendously experienced hacker, the sort Intelligence should have been keeping tabs on -- or it was an inside job."

Angel put his hands on Wesley's shoulders and gently urged him out of the chair and towards the door. "So one of our employees is up to something. You handle it. I've got total confidence in you."

Wesley turned to face him. "Angel -- it was in sector 17." At Angel's continuing look of "so what?" he elaborated. "In the sub basement. The facility that cares for Cordelia?"

Thirty seconds later Angel was six flights down the fire stairs and accelerating.

***

There was no one there when Angel arrived, and Cordelia was still sleeping peacefully, all the tubes and muted beeping things in their usual places. Her face was perfectly made up and her skin was subtly scented with perfume, just like she would have wanted. Angel sank into the chair they kept next to her bedside, his knees weak with relief, and took her hand. Whatever had come there, it hadn't hurt her. She'd suffered enough.

A red rose petal fell from Cordelia's limp, unresisting hand to the white sheets. It took Angel a long moment to recognize it. His eyes tracked from the bed to the table beside her. There was a huge fancy floral arrangement there, as per his standing orders. Maybe she'd woken up, reached out to touch them.

The only problem was, how had she pulled a red petal from a bouquet of white roses?

Dru. It had to be Dru. Angel checked Cordelia's throat and wrists, but her skin was unmarred, her chest rising and falling slowly. Hands trembling with anger and belated fear, Angel reached for the phone and called a meeting right there by Cordelia's bedside, five minutes ago. It wasn't like they were going to wake her, after all.

***

Angel paced back and forth in front of Cordelia's bed. "You said it yourself, Wes, it's an inside job."

"I said it might have been. In any case, Angel, we have well over a hundred employees. It's rather a jump to go from there to accusing Spike."

Angel turned on him. "Yeah? Do we have a hundred employees that are proven traitors?"

Fred piped up. "Well, kind of, yeah. I mean they work for us now..." she trailed off under the force of Angel's glare.

"How about a hundred employees that fell in love with Dru?"

"We have at least one," Lilah pointed out, gesturing at Angel.

Angel hurled the vase of defective flowers at her without bothering to look. In his peripheral vision he saw Fred jump and make an abortive move towards Cordy, but Lilah never flinched. "Shut up or I'll send you back to hell."

"Why this is hell, nor am I out of it," Lilah quoted softly. Wesley coughed and covered his mouth with his hand.

"Fine. If you wanna keep the tongue though, I suggest shutting the hell up. 'Cause eternity without listening to your cracks is starting to look real appealing."

"Spike didn't strike me as a real techie type," Gunn pointed out. Angel still wasn't used to him dressing for success. "We could check out the science department -- no offense, Fred. Or run a background check on our people, see who's got the know-how who's not telling us about it."

"What about that Eve girl? It's not like we know anything about her," Fred offered up her least favorite person at Wolfram &amp; Hart in place of her own team.

Angel shook his head. "She's got the senior partners on her side. She doesn't need to mess with security cameras."

Gunn shook his head. "I dunno, Angel. She spends her time hanging out in empty rooms waiting to jump out and go boo. Doesn't seem real high powered to me."

Angel made a "so-so" gesture with his hand. "Maybe not. But it does mean she's real good at getting into closed rooms."

Gunn nodded. "Fair enough. But so's Spike, right?"

Angel was getting tired of trying to convince his team of what was glaringly obvious. "Yeah, but Dru's not. Whatever errands Eve's running for the big bosses, they're gonna give her the firepower to get the job done. Whoever did this pops down, lets Dru in, gets scared off when they hear me coming and accomplishes nothing but getting themselves in trouble. Sounds like Spike to me."

Angel bottom lined it for them. "Ever since he learned to touch shit, Spike's gone from a pain in my ass to a serious hole in our security. We can't trust him, we can't control him, and we can't afford to take the risk. Especially not for Cordelia, who can't defend herself. Next time we could come down here to find Cordy with her throat ripped out. We need to break that amulet."

"But Cordy's fine, right?" offered Fred. "I mean, no different. It just seems a little drastic to go sending Spike to hell forever over a dropped flower petal. Especially when he's not here to defend himself."

"If he's innocent," Angel responded, "where is he? You ever known him to stay out of my way so long?"

"You can't get to holy ground till sundown anyway," Fred pointed out practically. "Maybe he'll turn up before then."

"Fine. Go. Hunt, trace, do whatever you want. You have till sunset. I'm staying here."

***

Angel crumpled yet another sketch of Cordelia in his hand. Nothing was quite right. Nothing captured the serenity of her, the perfect beauty of her stillness, like the Lady of Shallott.

He fucking hated it. He remembered her wrinkling her nose at him, scolding him with a kerchief tied over her hair, smelling of baby-spit up, knee deep in demon goo, fucking up his filing system beyond human comprehension. That was Cordelia being beautiful to him.

He leaned a little closer to the bed and stroked her hair back from her forehead. The blond had finally grown out. He liked to remember her this way best, before he loved her as anything but a friend, before everything had hurt so much.

"I'm sorry, Cordy," he said softly. "I tried to take care of you. But this is no life for a woman like you, stuck here in the dark with me. You should be free."

Angel knew the others would be mad at him, but there were some things he just couldn't talk about. He leaned over and gently pulled the plug.

The lamp went out. Angel cursed and plugged it in again, and this time pulled the right cord. The beeping machine finally went silent. The pump exhaled with a soft sigh. The trickling liquid dripped a final drop. Angel bent to give Cordelia one final kiss.

Her eyes popped open. "Hello, Angel. Killed anyone you love today?"

Angel fell to his knees and buried his face in her lap. "Cordelia, you're alive!"

"Not exactly. You know, Angel, there's other places you can get bitten by a vampire."

***

Cordelia vaulted lightly over the bed rail and started poking through the wardrobe. "Where are my clothes? Where are my shoes? Not that they won't be brutally outdated but hey, anything's better than slipper socks."

Cordy hadn't changed face, but she still looked feral. She'd lost weight in the coma and her cheekbones were sharper, more feline. In fact, in the long pale hospital gown, she almost reminded him of Dru.

She found an outfit -- not one Angel remembered -- in the closet and began stripping down as if he wasn't there. The curve of her breast in motion made Angel swallow hard and forget what he was going to say.

"By the way, Angel," she tossed over her shoulder. "Where's my baby?"

Angel winced for her. "Dead."

Cordy nodded. "Where's Connor?"

This time Angel winced for himself. Apparently the mindwipe spell only covered those conscious at the time and not insane and possessing second sight: he wondered how many more loopholes would come up to bite him in the ass. "Dead," he repeated.

"Well, that'll save some time."

Right. No matter how much she looked like his Cordy, no matter how much she sounded like his Cordy and moved like his Cordy and her ass curved into a heart shape like his Cordy, this was a demon, and no one he knew.

Angel felt in his pocket for a stake, then remembered he'd left it in Dru's shoulder. "Damn!"

"What, you were gonna dust me? I'm all hurt."

Angel settled for punching her back against the wall. "It's what we do with vampires, remember?"

Cordy rolled her eyes. "Yeah, except when we sleep with them and let them go. Or hire them as our secretaries. C'mon, Harmony gets a 401K and I get a wooden hello? Last I checked I was still on the hottie list, so how come I don't get a get out of dust free card? Did I lose my girlish figure?"

Angel's eyes dropped to her hips. They had rounded a little -- which was far from a bad thing.

Cordelia brushed by him stepped into a pair of slender, pale blue heels and stuck a foot out, rotating her ankle and contemplating them. "Not bad," she said appraisingly, "but this no mirrors thing is gonna suck. How's my hair?"

"Fine," said Angel, startled into answering. He felt like she wasn't taking this "fight to the death" thing sufficiently seriously.

Cordy -- the thing that used to be Cordy -- took a step forward and took his hands in hers. "Listen, I know this is hard for you, but I just want to say how much I appreciate this. It's given me a second chance at life."

Angel looked away from the sincerity in her eyes. "It's not that I didn't think of it," he said in a broken voice. "But I couldn't. I didn't do it."

Cordy shifted into game face and her grip tightened on his wrists like a vice. "I know. I wasn't talking to you."

From behind, something heavy and metal clobbered him over the head.

***

When Angel woke up, his keys were missing from his pocket. He found that one of the cars with necrotic glass was missing from the garage: the only one with a back seat. Dru had left him a dead rose. Cordy had left him a lipstick kiss. Lilah had left nothing for him, but she left Wesley a good-bye note, saying only "Us dead girls have to stick together. I'm sorry." Wesley, of course, had no idea why.

He found Spike eventually, curled up on the floor of Angel's own suite. Next to him, the phone dangled off the hook. "I can't bloody do it, Angel. I can't call her. I've tried all afternoon. I can call the London speaking clock, for fuck's sake, but when I think of Buffy my hand just goes right through."

Angel hung up the phone. "It's all right, boy," he said awkwardly.

Spike looked up. "It is?"

"No. But you get used to it." He poured two drinks with hands that hardly shook at all, and Spike managed to hold his until it was empty.


End file.
